Announcing Melissa Fite Johnson’s “A Crooked Door Cut in the Sky”

February 7, 2018

We are so pleased to announce the release of Melissa Fite Johnson’s A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, now available for order! You can purchase a copy here, or over under the books menu, where you may find a few other titles you’d like to pick up.

Her poems received the following praise:

“A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky is shot through with loss, with the ways our bodies fail us, and with what we can’t—or don’t say. The speakers are daughters, wives, not-mothers, and they occupy domestic spaces in which “nothing is missing.” Indeed, everything is present in Melissa Fite Johnson’s elegiac collection, even the empty spaces: a remembered father, the children not to be born, the past that is at once long-gone and not gone at all.”

“Melissa Fite Johnson’s A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky is like a poetry photo album where poems appear like perfect snapshots of a life being lived. Johnson’s poems question “what it means to be human”—what we hold onto and what we let go. The narrative beauty of these poems lead us into a garden where branches “quilt patterns into the sky”—the possibility of becoming a parent and the experience of losing one. This
chapbook grounds us in the past and present and connects the two worlds—leaving me thankful for this poet who opens the door for us to walk into her poems and join her.

This is the first of our 2017 winners to be ready, with four more to follow (and one likely within the next week or two).

If you think you have a manuscript we might love, our annual contest begins February 15th — that is just a little over ONE WEEK. You can find all the details you need at our Submittable once it’s open, or elsewhereon our website. We can’t wait to start thinking about what amazing works we’ll get to read soon!